Clint Enns (MA ’13, PhD ’19), a graduate of York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), has been named the 2026–27 Artist in Residence at the Jackman Humanities Institute.
A competitive, year-long program, the residency brings artists into close dialogue with faculty and students through lectures, workshops, seminars and teaching.
He will participate in the Circle of Fellows as part of the institute’s annual theme, Doubles and Doppelgängers, which explores ideas of reflection and replication across culture, technology and the humanities, and connects to Enns’s work with AI and image-making.
From Punctum to Promptum: Instructions that Feel Human
During the residency, Enns will continue to develop his concept of the “promptum,” which emerged from his work with AI-generated images. His residency project, From Punctum to Promptum: Instructions that Feel Human, focuses on how these images are produced and experienced.
He will examine how AI image-generation tools use and reshape existing images and data, and how artists engage these tools to question and challenge their underlying systems.
“Artists participate in, and sometimes benefit from and influence, infrastructures that have real world ethical concerns,” says Enns. “It seems like a difficult position to create from, but one that seems necessary in order to think through and better understand these new technologies.”
The project will engage with broader questions around authorship, originality and ethics in AI-generated art, and how artists respond to rapidly evolving technologies.
A practice developed at AMPD
Enns earned his MA and PhD in Cinema & Media Studies at AMPD.
“York gave me the time and intellectual space to develop a conceptual framework for my work with moving images. York is also connected to and has long played a significant role in Toronto’s film and video community, producing generations of filmmakers, critics, writers, curators and cultural leaders.”
Following his PhD, Enns has continued his work as a SSHRC-supported postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Professor Michael Zryd in the Department of Cinema & Media Arts.
His current research focuses on artist-run centres in Canada, including compiling a comprehensive list of centres and co-operatives engaged with moving images from 1960s to the present.
As part of this work, he has developed a method to help smaller artist-run centres document their own histories through self-published books or zines.
The aim is to create simple, low-cost publications in book or zine form that can be shared through archives and
online platforms, such as projects
like Film Fort available through the
Internet Archive.
“These books function as a gesture toward the future, a way of saying that we were here, this is what we did.”
“I have been a member of artist-run culture my entire adult life and have remained committed to a DIY-ethos which often means finding solutions that may not be ‘perfect,’ but which are hopefully ‘perfect enough’.”
Learn more about Clint Enns and his work at clintenns.ca.